Jodine Mayberry: NSA has better things to do than track gamers

Can’t you just picture it: Vast roomfuls of 20-somethings hunched over joysticks feverishly playing “World of Warcraft” or “Halo” while searching for real trolls passing real messages to each other in the virtual world?

How many of these worker bees are required at three shifts a day, playing how many games? What dangerous secrets are they uncovering?

There were enough of these top secret gamesters, according to an 82-page report leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden (the gift that keeps on giving), that a “deconfliction” unit had to manage them to keep them from interfering with one another.

“Deconfliction,” there’s a word.

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But, the report indicates, the game-playing spies did not uncover any terrorists exchanging any real information with each other inside the games, although they were able to identify some potential terrorists who were just playing the games. Everybody has to have a hobby.

Why would terrorists even use the games to exchange information? There are so many easier ways to do it, both electronically and in old-fashioned, low-tech ways, like sending a coded email or taping a package to the underside of a bench.

I don’t find this monitoring of computer games any more alarming than all of the other things our intelligence community is doing without our knowledge or consent, which is to say, I find it very alarming. But if they’re watching me play “Words with Friends,” we’re all wasting a lot of time.

What I do find appalling is the sheer size of our intelligence-gathering, the cost to taxpayers and the huge waste of resources.

I know, our spy masters claim these programs have averted 50 potential terrorist attacks, while their critics estimate, maybe one. The spy masters have very large, secret budgets to defend and lying is their profession.

So boy, howdy, if you’re looking for big government to rail about, you’ve come to the right place.

In 2010, the Washington Post published an article, based on two years of research in the public records, estimating that some 1,200 agencies, employing more than 845,000 people with top secret clearance, are engaged in military and civilian intelligence gathering at a cost of about $75 billion a year.

Snowden’s recent disclosures point to 1.5 million people having top secret clearance, from janitors to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hundreds of thousands of them are employees of private contractors that are slurping greedily out of the public trough.

Nine days after 9/11, Congress appropriated $40 billion in new money to fight global terrorism, and in 2002, another $36 million, according to the Post.

Anonymous office buildings full of spies ring Washington and operate in at least 15 other American cities. The $2 billion Bluffdale, Utah, National Security Agency’s electronic spying center is up and running. I wonder if it had problems with its website startup.

This is what Republicans commonly ridicule as “throwing money at the problem.”

The Post article quoted intelligence officers who say the problem with all of this intelligence is that the myriad of uncoordinated agencies merely “reslice” the same data and pick the same “low-hanging fruit,” while failing to make inroads into countries like Iran and North Korea or discover terrorism in our own country.

One notable example is U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 30 at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

The Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group might have noticed him going off the rails, but it was focused on gathering general terrorism intelligence that other agencies were already heavily mining.

“It’s the soccer ball syndrome. Something happens and they want to rush to cover it,” said one official.

The sheer volume of intelligence reports, circulated every hour of every day, becomes counterproductive because nobody can read them all.

Very frightening real cyber warfare is going on all over the globe right now and China is a very big player. South Korean banks, Saudi Arabia’s oil industry and Iran’s nuclear program have been attacked.

Imagine waking up tomorrow to find all of our banking or Social Security information has been deleted, our entire electric grid has been taken down or our nuclear missiles have been launched.

I want our bright young spies working on that, not on what our avatars are doing to each other in some silly online game.

Jodine Mayberry is a longtime journalist. Her column appears every Friday. You can reach her at jodinemayberry@comcast.net. Read her blog, This Week in Reality, at dtweekreality.blogspot.com.